Gagaku for Diplomats

Last week, I interpreted at a seminar held by Jinja Honchō for the diplomatic corps in Tokyo. Attendance was not great because it was Easter weekend and the weather was foul, but some people did come, and they said that they enjoyed the seminar.

The subject was gagaku. Gagaku is the tradition of court music that is now played at many Shinto matsuri, and that accompanies miko kagura, the sacred dance performed by miko. The seminar started with a lecture from the head of the oldest non-governmental gagaku group in Japan, Revd Ono, who is also the chief priest of a jinja and an elder of Jinja Honchō, and continued with a live performance and a chance to see the instruments up close.

The lecture was interesting. Revd Ono emphasised that the music came from western Asia along the Silk Road over two thousand years ago, and was developed in China and the Korean peninsula before being imported to Japan. There were two forms of gagaku in China, one for sacred rites and one for feasts and parties, and it was the latter that was imported to Japan, because Japan already had its own sacred music.

The tradition died out in both China and Korea, in both cases probably due to colonialism. In China, it was Britain’s Opium War, and in Korea it was Japan’s annexation of the country. (And I get to feel responsible for both.) However, there has been something of a revival in South Korea, apparently with Japanese help.

The Japanese tradition did not have everything easy, either. The major disruption was the Ōnin War of the late fifteenth century, in which Kyoto, the capital, was a battlefield for ten years, and so musicians scattered. After the war ended, a lot of effort was put into rebuilding the tradition, but things did not come back exactly as before. (This may be the point at which the music slowed down — I have heard that there are records from a thousand years ago of the pieces played at a party, and at the current tempo they would not have been able to finish that programme.)

From the tenth century there were three centres at which gagaku was transmitted, in Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara. In the seventeenth century another was established in Edo (modern Tokyo) to take responsibility for the matsuri held by the Tokugawa shōgun. This led to the existence of four slightly different traditions. After the Meiji Revolution, the government decided to centralise and standardise gagaku (they were very much into centralisation and standardisation), and the four traditions agreed on common scores for the traditional pieces. Any piece on which it was not possible to agree was dropped from the repertoire — and Revd Ono thinks that this is regrettable. These pieces were all then offered to the Tennō, and a group established within the Imperial Household Agency to perform them. This still exists. A few years later, permission was granted for ordinary people to form gagaku groups, and that is when Revd Ono’s ancestor formed his group.

The performance was also interesting. The first piece they performed, after a traditional short opening called “Netori”, was “Etenraku”. This is always the standard demonstration piece. But they followed it with “Etenraku — but with a different beat”. Normal Etenraku is in 4/4 time, but the second version was in a mixture of 2/3 and 3/3 time. It did sound quite different. Finally, they performed a dance piece, Nasori.

The general association of gagaku with Shinto matsuri is post-Meiji, although specific matsuri at particular jinja, those with Imperial associations, had involved gagaku performances from much earlier. However, when the musicians scattered during the Ōnin War, they took the traditions across the country, and influenced local sacred, and folk, music. Two of the traditional wind instruments were soon lost, because they were too difficult to make, which meant that the pieces had to be adapted as well, and so local music is quite different from gagaku, but with a clear influence.

Revd Ono emphasised the changes in gagaku over time, and finished his lecture by saying that he hoped the audience appreciated that it wasn’t the same now as it was 1300 years ago. It is, however, a continuous and living tradition — and that is precisely why it has changed.